dreamchildren

1858: Charles Dickens, Speech in the Freemasons’ Hall in London following the proposal of a toast to “Prosperity to the Hospital for Sick Children”, closing paragraph

The dreamchildren whom I would now raise, if I could, before every one of you, according to your various circumstances, should be the dear child you love, the dearer child you have lost, the child you might have had, the child you certainly have been. Each of these dreamchildren should hold in its powerful hand one of the little children now lying in the Child’s Hospital, or now shut out of it to perish. Each of these dreamchildren should say to you, “O, help this little suppliant in my name; O, help it for my sake!”

1996: Francis Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, p79

…met winter muses, unacademic, and cloistered by Forty-second Street and Broadway, instead of the Shelleyan dreamchildren with whom he had regaled their expectant appreciation.

2002: Elisabeth Hallett, Stories of the Unborn Soul: The Mystery and Delight of Pre-birth Communication, p260

Perhaps some of the dreamchildren and vision-children who never show up in this reality are members of other families that we love and belong to, elsewhere.